About HTML
HTML stands for Hypertext
Markup Language and is the language
used to create hypertext documents for viewing on the World Wide Web. A
feature of this language is that it can be used to create a document that
can be viewed on a variety of platforms over the Internet. HTML writing
is extremely simple and requires no programming knowledge. A HTML document
consists of a plain text file with codes that are inserted into it that
allow the text to be "marked up" or to provide special functions
such as creating hyperlinks or displaying graphic images. The file can
be created using any text editor or using programs such as HTML Writer
or HTML Assistant. The codes, called tags, instruct Web Browsers such as
Mosaic or Netscape to format text in different ways, create hyperlinks
to other documents, or display inline images. Many tags come in pairs with
an opening and a closing tag such as <center> and
</center>. The less than (<) and greater than (>) are always
used to indicate the tags and the backslash (/) is always used as part
of the closing tag. Tags are used to determine who blocks of text should
appear. For instance the tags <b> and </b> can be used to display
a selected block of text in bold format. The following is a sample HTML
document showing the use of these tags. The figure shows this document
is displayed by the Netscape Web browser. The other tags in this example
will be explained in later sections of this chapter. This is an example
of how the center and bold tags can be used to format text within an HTML
document.
<center>This text should be centered on the page.</center><p>
<b>This text should be bold.</b><p>
Display this document
The final appearance of an HTML document is highly dependent on the
Web browser used to display it. A markup language such as HTML provides
a logical structure for the text in that the bits of text are defined more
by the logical function of the text within the document rather than how
the text will look. Such a logical structure allows the different browser
programs to process the information intelligently. In creating an HTML
document, you use tags to indicate the logical representation of the document
instead of identifying individual fonts and sizes. The font size and style
can still be set by the user from within the browser program but the relative
size of the text is controlled by the tags used within the document.
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